I'm Fine and Neither Are You by Pagán Camille

Author:Pagán, Camille [Pagán, Camille]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

The next morning, I stood in the kitchen surveying Sanjay’s success. The dishes were done and the counters, while hardly sparkling, were cleaner than they’d been since Riya’s last visit. In less than a week Sanjay had already aced one of my three requests. Granted, he had not secured a job yet—which was fine, I knew that took time—but if the man was willing to sanitize the sink, it was feasible that he could eventually solve world peace if he were so inclined.

He’d have the money thing figured out in no time.

“Miles, stop !” yelled Stevie from somewhere else in the house.

“No, you stop!” he yelled back.

My instinct was to intervene before one of them sent the other to urgent care, but Sanjay was awake—he could do it. I began going through the motions of making coffee as I waited for him to intervene.

“I’m telling Mommy!” Stevie hollered. “Mommy!”

Miles reacted by screeching like a chimpanzee. A passerby would have reasonably wondered whether he had just snapped his femur, but I knew better. This was his power play to Stevie’s tattling.

I paused, then poured fresh water from the coffee carafe into the machine.

The screaming continued.

I measured coffee grounds and tapped them into the coffee maker’s metal filter, trying to ignore my pounding head.

There was a sudden surge of silence. I smiled, thinking Sanjay had finally intercepted.

Then a heavy thud and a new cry—a real one. I pressed the “Start” button on the coffee maker and marched into the living room.

Stevie, clad in her nightgown, was sitting on Miles’ chest. “What?” she said, like I was interrupting a private moment between them.

Miles’ face was crimson, and he was gasping for breath. “Help!” he wheezed.

“Get off your brother before I spank you,” I said to Stevie.

Still sitting, she glared at me like I had already swatted her. Then she began to berate me. “Our family rule is use your words! Hitting is mean , Mommy! Mean!”

“Oh, I’m sorry, were those your words sitting on your brother’s chest suffocating him?” I pointed up the stairs. “Go up to your room and get dressed, or I’ll show you mean .”

Glowering, she lifted herself off of Miles.

“Go!” I yelled.

Miles’ face was returning to its natural color, but he was still lying there crying. And as I looked at him more closely, I realized he was also looking at me as if I were the ghost of Joan Crawford. “Don’t spank Stevie, Mommy!” he yelled.

The enemy of my son’s enemy was his beloved sister. “Oh, come on, Miles. I’m not going to and you know it.”

“Then why did you say it?” he wailed.

Desperation? Another occasion that felt like rock bottom but was actually a trapdoor to somewhere even lower? It was anyone’s guess. “Go up to your room and get dressed,” I told him. “Now.”

Then I went to look for Sanjay. He wasn’t in the living room, so I assumed he had fallen back asleep. But when I reached our room, I found him sitting up in bed on his laptop with a pair of headphones on.

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